IV.

Just ten years ago, in 1878, Mr. Michael Davitt and Mr. John Devoy (the
latter of whom had been commissioned in 1865 by the Fenian leader
Stephens, as "chief organiser of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the
British army"), being then together in America, promulgated, Mr. Davitt
in a speech at Boston, and Mr. Devoy in a letter sent to the _Freeman's
Journal_ in Dublin, the outlines of a scheme for overthrowing British
rule in Ireland by revolutionising the ownership of land in that
country.

The basis of this scheme had been laid thirty years before, in 1848, by
Finton Lalor, John Mitchel, and the present Archbishop of Cashel, then a
simple curate.

It was thus stated by Lalor in his paper, the _Irish Felon_:--

"The entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and
down to the centre of the earth, is vested, as of right, in the people
of Ireland. The soil of the country belongs as of right to the entire
people of the country, not to any one class, but to the nation."

This was a distinct denial of the right of private property in land. If
true of Ireland and the Irish people this proposition was true of all
lands and of all peoples. Lalor, though more of a patriot than of a
philosopher, saw this plainly; and in one of the three numbers of his
paper which appeared before it was suppressed by the British Government,
he said "the principle I propose goes to the foundations of Europe, and